Radeon RX 500 "Polaris Evolved" Hardware Launches

[L_A_G]

Seeing how anyone paying attention has known that the 500 series is mostly the 400 series with some of the kinks worked out it shouldn't come as a surprise that the performance uplift isn't exactly earth shattering.

From what I've seen the major changes are that they've fixed the dodgy power delivery on the reference and reference-based boards and moved to a more mature manufacturing process. The original 400 series was made using Samsung's 14nm LPP process and the 500 series seems to be made with Samsung's 14nm LPC process, which mainly differs in higher yields and fewer manufacturing stages, thus decreasing manufacturing costs.

What this all means in practice is that the 500 series cards will clock higher than their 400 series equivalents. Apparently pretty much all 580s will overclock into the 1400s if they don't come clocked that high out of the box and many of them do. For comparison none of the reference or reference-based 480s could reach and most of the heavily improved cards were either unable to reach those clocks or had a hard time doing so.

[torsionbar28]

Rebrandeons confirmed. About the only good news is that hopefully AMD's Linux drivers won't be broken for these cards simply because they are literally overclocked/overvolted polaris parts from last year.

Ahem, I believe this is referred to as the "intel strategy". Make some minor tweaks, improve performance by a couple percents, boom, a new product is born!

[Ardje]

that $239 is 379 euro here so $400 :-(

[untore]

the previous rebrand 200x300x had some meaningful upgrades like the 380 using gcn3 like the fiji cards and the 390 going to gcn2 from gc1, so there were decent upgrades maybe because the top (fiji) shared more with the lower end tiers because it was the first usage of hbm so they wanted to keep the pipeline thin to see how they performed. This time around the high-end vega is further from the low/mid range, so nothing trickled down the low/mid tier and produced this flatout bland rebrand. Unless we are gonna see some lowmid vegas and I am completely wrong

[stiiixy]

Didn't naming schemes used to use the same major number, in this case by AMD 4, but add +1 or +10 etc to the second or third part of the number scheme to denote a simple revision instead of a technology upgrade?

For example the nVidia GeForce 250 was refreshed as a 260, or revised to a 250GT.

Or something along those lines. It got co fusing when the previous versions became the new versions and then there were new versions but it was mixed with previous versions.

Its a preposterous situation right now for us mere GFX dabblers.

[eydee]

We may not like rebrands too much, but truth to be told, those who did not jump on the RX 400 hype train last year can see the new series as a better upgrade path. Slightly faster, bugs ironed out, same price (theoretically), mature drivers. If only there was a 590 too, matching performance of the 1070...

[baka0815]

that $239 is 379 euro here so $400 :-(

$239 is net price, without vat. So it is more like $284 (gross, 19% vat). But taking the current exchange ratio for dollar <> euro it should be about €265.
The 8GB variant from MSI costs about €279 at mindfactory

qarium keep in mind that this is a 4GB card you're referring to! The 8GB card from PowerColor costs about €299.

[stiiixy]

I agree with you there eydee. I'm glad I held off for this round.

I haven't seen any mention of the BIOS issues with Ryzen yet though. I plan on doing CPU and VGA together.

[hugo8621]

RX560 could be good. Full 1024 processors and hopefully also the lower idle and video playback power consumption. Like to see this one in the phoronix benchmarking list

[AndyChow]

RX560 comes out in May. I'm more interested in the RX550, which I was unable to find for sale anywhere. I don't have an iGPU, so it would be an easy way for me to have a cheap card (50W) as primary, and passthrough the good stuff. I'm currently using an old 6850 as my primary, and that junk is 150W! Amazing how things are improving.